Spontaneous emission from a trapped atom

Abstract

We solve a problem of spontaneous emission from an atom trapped in a harmonic binding potential for several initial states of the center of mass: the ground state, the thermal state, and the coherent state. The spectral and temporal properties of the emitted light are discussed. We stress the role of the Doppler shift.PACS number(s): 42.50.Vk

Nonsimultaneous Spontaneous Emission from an Atomic Wavepacket

“…Standard treatments of spontaneous emission from atomic wave packets (Cohen-Tannoudji et al, 1991; Graham et al, 1992;Rzażewski and Żakowicz, 1992;Ren et al, 1992Rzażewski et al, 1994Steuernagel and Paul, 1995;Stoop and Rzażewski, 1995) assume situations where the atomic exited state couples to the electromagnetic vacuum at all points of the wave packet "at t = 0". For t > 0 the atom starts to decay.…”